THEATRE REVIEW: ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD



Pictured: Ted Dykstra, Jordan Pettle

JOHN COULBOURN, Special to TorSun
15 FEB 2013
R: 3/5

TORONTO - Imagine being trapped in a situation where everyone else knows exactly what’s happening and what to do, while you are forced to make it up as you go along. It’s the stuff of which nightmares — and the best kind of absurdist theatre — are made. That would be absurdist theatre the likes of which was created by  playwright Tom Stoppard in a seminal deconstruction of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, titled ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD —  a work revived by Soulpepper in a production that opened Wednesday at the Young Centre.


As written, Stoppard’s 1966 work is a dizzying sort of affair, wherein our focus becomes not the melancholy Prince of Denmark and the horns of his dilemma, but rather the two all but inconsequential characters of title. And while Hamlet’s erstwhile classmates certainly seem surprised to find themselves suddenly centre stage in a crisis everyone understands but them, they give it a game try, even though it is obvious they are in way over their heads.


Under the direction of Joe Ziegler, Ted Dykstra is cast as Rosencrantz opposite Jordan Pettle’s Guildenstern — although even they seem to have trouble figuring out which is which and who is who, as they wander, in utter bewilderment, though the carnage Stoppard has created in engineering this head-on collision between Shakespeare’s best known tragedy and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.


For those who have followed his work, Dykstra’s uncanny and oft-demonstrated ability to shine brightest as the dullest bulb in the chandelier is happily no less delightful here for its familiarity and, indeed, he proves to be the standout in what emerges, at best, as a pretty perfunctory production of a classic. As his more bookish, but no less confused sidekick, Pettle never lets us see him sweat, contenting himself with merely showing up and delivering his lines, making no attempt whatsoever to inhabit the utter bewilderment his character tries so hard to disguise with his bookishness.


As the two of them get more and more tangled in events that they clearly don’t understand, Stoppard anchors it all with glimpses of the familiar tragedy unfolding around them, with Soulpepper regulars Gregory Prest, Diego Matamoros, Nancy Palk, William Webster and Kenneth Welsh stepping into characters like Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius and the Player King respectively, all to adequate effect. From his directoral perch, Ziegler does a more than workman-like job of moving things along, enabling the intrepid titular twosome at the heart of his tale to wander with ease in and out of Shakespeare’s familiar story in search of meaning — but ultimately it feels like his focus has been more on dealing with the challenges of staging a proscenium play in the round, rather than on shaping performances to cultivate the confusion from which the comedy grows. So, in the end, the news that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead is more than mitigated by the fact that they failed to come to life in the first place.